Students in Electrical Engineering have a difficult time visualizing and understanding the abstract and complicated nature of three-dimensional, vector-valued electric and magnetic fields. Thus, the objective of this project is to obtain instrumentation for an undergraduate electromagnetics laboratory that will be integrated into a two-semester electromagnetics course sequence and into senior-level Antennas and Microwave Theory courses. The overall pedagogical goal of this project is to use the equipment to develop a set of experiments that will provide a discovery learning and case study approach to undergraduate electromagnetics-related instruction. Each experiment will be preselected and predefined to illustrate a physical law or concept (i.e. the "case") and the experiments will be outlined in a laboratory manual. The students in these courses will be divided into groups and each group will perform one experiment during the semester. The experiments will also be designed to teach concepts that were not discussed in the class- room so the students have an opportunity to learn and discover material as a team and independently of the instructor. That group will then prepare a lecture to present their findings and the additional concepts to the other students and to demonstrate their experiment. There will be discussions and questions during this session to complete the "case-study" approach The laboratory will allow the students to use dedicated experimental apparatus and state-of-the-art instrumentation to discover and analyze electromagnetic fields and related phenomena and compare with the analytical theory. This provides an excellent opportunity or the students to learn, interact, visualize and completely understand the abstract concepts associated with electromagnetic theory. These experiments re intended for junior and senior Electrical Engineering majors and will affect approximately 1,500 students over the course of 10 years, an estimated lifetime of a majority of the equipment.
